The skyport of Dendril City never got really busy. There were about twenty platforms in total, catering from ships the size of an SUV all the way up to full space liners. The ship they were waiting for with Milli was going to be a small passenger cruiser, about the size of an intercontinental plane back on old Earth.
It was a nice day, for Ialis. The bright star was overhead, the sky was relatively clear, and it hadn’t rained in about eight hours, so even the moss underfoot was firm and springy.
“I hope there will be a nest for me!” Milli said. “Normally they are only humanoid seats and floor seats. Bad for my butt.”
“Do they feed you?” Miles asked.
“Yes. Packets. Ugh. Don’t worry. When I get home mama will feed me some of that sweet mucus.”
I don’t even want to ask.
“That's… good,” Miles said, looking away to cast his gaze around the skyport.
Trin and Torg were at a nearby terminal, paging through the port’s navigation database for idle amusement. Milli was sitting on the moss next to Miles, a little pouch of possessions at her feet, waiting with him.
When she’d finished healing, her form had resolved as a shape that evoked beetle in her body and crab around her face, with eyestalks and mouth-parts. She had ten legs, the front four of which all had manipulators, and her wings had filled out to run the length of her body. They obviously weren’t useful for flying, but Miles had noticed that they changed color and occasionally switched angles as she talked, so Miles thought they probably had a role in communication.
As soon as Milli had been hooked back up to the comm network, her clan had booked her a flight back to the refugee station they lived on in Iteration 27,145.
It wasn’t going to be a direct transport, there were too many possible destinations for direct flights to go anywhere but the biggest hubs, but the spiral only ran in two directions, and her ticket would let her choose her rides until she was home.
Miles and the others were a little out of pocket from helping Milli recover and getting her set up, but he didn’t want to raise the issue with her clan.
He’d given in to the fear of missing out exactly once since he’d left Unsiel Station, when he was negotiating with Fran outside the dungeon, and he felt like her turning around and showing him kindness in return had been an immediate rebuke.
On post-bower Earth, the dynamic had been easy. It was dog-eat-dog. Unsiel Station had also been easy. On the refugee station, nobody had anything and everything was shared. Out here in the spiral, he probably needed a balance of vulnerability and self interest. He had to navigate the threat of betrayal without losing who he was.
Milli was starting to get restless with waiting, shuffling in place and turning around in circles. After a minute, she turned towards the terminal that Trin and Torg were playing with.
Miles was about to follow her, when his comm buzzed in his belt pouch.
There it is. Every eight hours, like clockwork.
He felt dread as he took his comm out and unlocked the screen.
> Damien Asher > Miles
>
> You probably think I’m bitter because we had our hopes pinned on you, but that’s not it. You were never any use to us. You still aren’t. Except that those creatures lording it over us have put something in your hands you don’t deserve. It needs to be with us, the people who actually stayed behind to try and make something of this country. If you did the right thing now then the people you left behind might not think you were so worthless.
The messages had been relentless, Earth morning, noon, and night. They'd left Miles feeling anxious and sick. He was almost afraid to touch his comm.
Each of them had been a variation on a theme. After months of silence, his father was sending him messages about Miles' failure, his duty, and what he owed his family. It felt like he was being beaten with a stick at the same time that someone who knew him tried to hack his brain.
Deleting the message from his father, he went back and opened the alert that had presumably started it all.
> Entrant Allocations > Miles Asher
>
> Hello Miles Asher. As you may be aware, your home world has recently taken up residence in the political-commercial union of the Spiral.
>
> On date 27,201.90 a survey team discovered 34 asteroids containing elements of interest in your world's space. This lot has been labeled as the Solar-1 Acquisition.
>
> As your iteration 27,200 has no strong unified governing body, these undeveloped material holdings have been subdivided into lots, to be apportioned to its qualifying sapient citizens on an equal distribution basis.
>
> You are one such qualifying sapient, entitling you to a claim of 0.000000119% of the mineral yield discovered in your system's space.
>
> In order to process and validate your claim, please visit your nearest allocation facility in Iteration 27,200 and present this message as evidence of your status as a qualifying citizen. To guard against impersonation and apportionment fraud, only claims presented on Earth of Iteration 27,200 can be validated.
>
> These allocations are final and carry the full weight of Spiral law. No preference is given to native heredity or class rankings in the distribution of allocations. No coercion or fraud is permitted in the redistribution of apportionment. Any apportionment going unclaimed for forty days following this message will be redistributed into claimed allocations.
>
> To locate your closest allocation facility, you may reply to this message with your geospatial coordinates. Thank you for your attention.
Miles closed the message and let his comm fall to his lap.
Lacking anything like a unified global government, or even an alliance of national governments, the rest of the weave had worked out that Earth wasn’t in a position to negotiate mining rights for asteroids floating in its unclaimed space.
Miles wouldn’t have felt confident arguing with the point.
Who would they even ask? There was no one owner of Earth’s asteroid belt. There were no thousand owners. The only way anyone, humans included, would benefit from what Solar space had by way of mineral wealth was if someone was found to be responsible for it. Either everyone had to wait ten or twenty years until a global consensus emerged on Earth, if it ever did, or they had to find another way.
Miles’ first reaction to the news had been to feel defensive. Someone had scouted Earth’s star system, found something they wanted, and worked out a way to get it. Regardless of how Spiral society was planning on distributing the find, they’d still made a de-facto claim over it.
The overbearing move would have generated more heat in him if he didn’t keep coming back to the practicalities. Earth hadn’t yet put forward a real voice in the spiral, and this wasn’t the worst way the spiral community could have been handling it.
Any number of powers in the weave could have just rolled in and claimed the entire system, if they’d wanted to do it that way.
Earth's space defense arsenal was only ever designed to be turned inward, and there wasn't much left of it functional.
Instead of just taking, the spiral powers-that-be had divided up the real estate in the most blunt and equal way possible, giving every surviving human a chance at a slice.
It seemed like a small slice at first, less than a millionth of a percent, but given the average size of asteroids in the system, that might easily translate into millions of tons of resources.
Miles wasn’t sure how much seln that would translate to. Once the packages were claimed, interested parties would be able to offer to buy them via comm, but Miles didn’t know enough about spiral economics to know what kind of figure that would be.
The spiral’s scheme for splitting the territory seemed brutally simple, but if they actually enforced the rules on coercion and fraud, it would also potentially benefit every human left alive. That wouldn’t necessarily have been the case if they’d allocated the resources to either the warlords or the governments-in-name-only.
The only thing Miles didn’t understand was why his family was suddenly so interested in him.
He assumed it was related to the apportionment, his father had said so specifically in one message, but why did a fraction of a fraction of a percent mean so much to them?
They had thousands of people living in their settlement, and if they didn’t think they could extort the profits of this scheme from people they literally held the power of life and death over, what hope did they have of doing so from Miles?
He wasn’t sure it would matter. Miles’ closest allocation facility was back on Earth. If he wanted to take advantage of it, he’d need to leave Ialis and travel.
Dropping his comm back into his belt pouch, Miles wandered over to the terminal.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“That is Histiche,” Trin was saying. “Prime planet. Iteration 26,606.”
Trin was pointing at a dusty-looking yellow planet with a smattering of purple-green. The screen showed an abstract representation of a star system. Two suns, one white, one yellow, with a handful of rocky planets orbiting the yellow star. A label at the top of the display declared that it was a diagram of Iteration 26,606.
Miles still had a headache from frowning at his comm, but he welcomed the distraction from his family's toxic messages.
“You have two stars in your iteration?” Miles asked him.
“Yes. They dance around,” Trin said, drawing an imaginary line on the screen with the tip of his finger. “It gets hot, then we go underground. Sun cities and cave cities. We swap every generation. That’s eh… every forty iterations. I am a cave boy.”
“Your civilization moves between the surface and caves, and you were born in the caves, so you’re a cave boy?” Miles asked, wanting to make sure he’d understood.
“Yes. Cave boys and cave girls are smaller, more inwards.”
“Is that from nutrition differences, or…?”
“No. Different kind of boy, different kind of girl.” On the screen, Trin tapped the dusty planet, which made it expand until it filled the screen. He dragged his finger around for a minute, spinning the sphere until a particular landmass was facing them, then stretched it to zoom in.
Cities appeared on the diagram, chaotic sprawls of rounded buildings. As Trin zoomed in further, Miles could see details. They were low buildings, one or two stories high. They were the same color as the surrounding rock, except for the roofs, which were alternately painted white or covered in silver panels.
“My mom’s home,” he said, indicating a particular building.
They both stared at it for a few seconds, Miles not wanting to break the silence.
Finally, Miles asked, “Why did you leave?”
Trin made a fluting humming sound. “On Histiche, I work as thief. It’s fine. No law problems. Sideways stealing is allowed. Up stealing bad, down stealing bad, sideways stealing is fine.”
“I don’t get it,” Miles said. “What’s sideways stealing?”
“People who have same as you. Not more rich or more poor.”
“So it’s legal to steal from people who are in the same economic class?” Miles asked.
“Yes, sideways. But. I stole up. It was an accident.”
“And that’s illegal?” Miles said. “And you ran?”
“Yes. Big law problems. I left. Laws on Histiche are so different, Spiral doesn’t send you back.”
Miles struggled to put Trin’s meaning together. He’d stolen from someone it was illegal for him to steal from, because of some kind of class differences, and he’d fled to escape prosecution? And it sounded like the spiral didn’t extradite back to Histiche because of differences in the law.
“What would happen to you if you went back?” Miles asked.
“They kill me!” Trin said. Then, a few seconds later, “Well, not kill me. But there’s a big fine.”
“It doesn’t sound like sideways-thief was a great career choice,” Miles observed.
“Yeah, yeah. You not great career choice.”
Miles stepped up, taking over the terminal. He zoomed back out to the full spiral view, then dragged the string of stars until he reached the bottom. Earth was Iteration 27,200, the second to last in the line. He selected it, and had Earth filling in the screen in a couple of taps.
“This is Earth,” Miles said. “My home world. Iteration 27,200.”
Everyone crowded around to look at it over Miles' shoulder.
Clitck. ‘Green,’ Torg said.
“Yeah,” Miles agreed.
He zoomed in further, finding the North American continent, the scrolling around until he found a scar of brown cutting through a pine forest near the northeast coast.
He zoomed in further, until the display showed a steel-gray wreck. One of Earth’s second generation orbital battleships, downed in some panic conflict immediately after the bower break.
There’d been obvious changes since the last time it was spaceworthy. Parts had been removed, opened up, salvaged. A shanty town of huts and corrugated steel lean-tos dotted the forest around it, with the Garlington acting as the control center for settlement.
It was a really high quality image. Miles bet he’d even be able to make out the solitary crates if he zoomed in close enough.
“What was falling out of false universe like?” Trin asked.
Miles zoned out, looking at the frozen image of the settlement, but thinking of a night over a year before.
A night sky gone white. A wave of photons boiling off the ragged edge of space. Lightning striking from one part of the sky to another. All the grass standing up on end, like hair exposed to a static field. Civilian tech frying itself out and Miles’ social circle shrinking to just the people who could hear him yelling. Fires set by deteriorating power lines, and then by deteriorating people.
Earth had gotten off easy, considering the energies involved. In the end, their panic had done at least half as much damage again as the radiation.
“The tearing space triggered a flash of light at the boundary,” Miles said. “Something to do with how our spacetime works, then the light set off a bunch of solar flares. Between the two, a lot of Earth's technology got fried, and it didn’t take much more than that to send us into chaos. The government failed, markets failed, things got messy in the power vacuum."
"You didn't feel falling?" Trin asked.
"No, that's just a metaphor. If a planet actually fell anywhere there'd be nothing of it left when it landed."
All the language surrounding a bower break was couched in metaphors of falling, dropping, crashing. Miles had heard it explained as a water drop falling through a crack in a leaky tank. But it wasn't really like that.
Miles had been idle at the terminal for too long, and it reset to the spiral view.
Torg stepped up, dragging a pincer across the screen, selecting an iteration a little way back from Earth.
The screen changed to show a dull red star orbited by a single rocky planet. Torg focused the interface on it, and its label appeared at the top of the screen.
Clack. ‘Torg,’ Torg said.
The interface mirrored his statement. The label read ‘Planet Torg, Iteration 26,899’.
Miles and Trin stared at him for a second.
“Your homeworld called Torg?” Trin asked, incredulous.
Tick. ‘Yes.’
“You are Torg from Torg?”
Tick. ‘Yes.’
They all stared at planet Torg for a minute.
Eventually the silence was broken by Trin, asking the question that Miles had been putting to himself for days, without any sign of a decision.
“Miles, you going home?” Trin asked.
Miles’ gaze fell from the terminal to the moss.
The apportionment was an opportunity. Maybe a huge opportunity. And it was his due. If he didn’t go for it, he’d lose it, and be left watching others profit from his inaction.
He didn’t hate the idea of seeing Earth again, either, or seeing pine forests again.
The thing he dreaded was being on the same planet as his mother, his father, his sister, and their organization.
He wished they’d been able to make allowances for off-world humans when they’d designed this scheme.
Earth is a big planet, right? I can probably avoid three people.
“I think maybe I will,” Miles said.
“I’ll come with you?” Trin asked.
“You want to come? You want to come to Earth?” Miles asked.
“Yes. To come with you.”
Miles was shocked, and touched, and terrified for Trin.
“That’s not a good idea,” he said. “It’s not safe there for spiral sapients.”
When Earth had passed through the catastrophe of the bower break and come out the other side surrounded by unknown alien civilizations, all the old vices of humanity had come back in a big way. Xenophobia and superstition had been big sellers in the aftermath. It hadn’t been pretty. It hadn’t been orderly. Humanity hadn’t put its best foot forward or shown its best face to its new neighbors.
Things were still a mess. A concerning fraction of humans still thought spiral sapients were monsters, demons, or alien invaders, depending on the specific brand of disinformation they enjoyed. Provincial demagogues were happy to keep humanity isolated and afraid, and the ‘humanitarian’ efforts of the Forward Fleet were viewed with distrust if not outright hatred.
After leaving Earth, Miles had found out that there were maybe two cities on the entire planet where non-human sapients were safe and accepted. Neyjavik, on the landmass that had been called Iceland, and Algiers, on the north coast of Africa. From what he’d heard, ‘safe’ was a relative term in both.
Maybe I could visit anyway. It should be easy to dodge three people when I’m half a world away.
“I can play human,” Trin said. “Eeeh I am human. I wash in acid. Give me the rent moneys. I am bald like a fruit. I hate naked and I hate sleeping near a face.”
“You’d need to shave your fur,” Miles suggested.
“Eeeh I hate my fur. I rub blade on face every single day.”
It’s probably best if Trin doesn’t come to Earth.
After a few minutes of waiting, Milli’s ship arrived, a wide bulging vessel that couldn’t have been efficient to get through an atmosphere. It came down with a sound like tearing paper, stopping to hover a couple of feet above the platform.
It took another few minutes for its Ialis-bound passengers to disembark. They all looked rough and ready for a fight. Miles guessed that was the kind of tourist Ialis attracted.
The three of them said their goodbyes to Milli, and a few minutes later, they were watching her ship rise back up through the air. A message to Miles’ comm confirmed she’d got on board safely.
> Milli > Miles
>
> I did it. And there are nests!
Miles was left feeling pensive and restless. If he was going to head back to Earth, then there’d be arrangements to make. He didn’t need to decide whether he definitely was right now, but he could already feel the push and pull of forces affecting his decision. He was going to decide to go back. He could already tell.
He was sitting on some cash, now. It was a long trip back to 27,200, and he’d need passage, supplies, and ideas on how to keep himself safe in a large city.
He’d also need to pay his share of the rent up-front, unless he wanted to come back to Ialis to find his apartment gone, with Trin and Torg turfed out.
If I’m even coming back to Ialis, he thought.
He’d need to decide that, too.